Communicating, connecting and influencing in the Conversation Age

Facebook and Personal Branding

Nice piece by Brian Solis on the emerging role of Facebook, and how it should be a part of your personal branding. With FB there's the usual cool factor and ALL those widgets; users, as he points out, can easily share a "wealth of integrated activity" including Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr for sharing photos, Meetup for sharing live events, RSS readers can be used to share relevant stories and so on. Then there are the community news streams (the news stream represents the collective activities of all your "friends" or community). These are shared experiences as well.

But the real key is about about how you interact and participate in that community. It's a form of personal branding, using social media platforms. You need to be involved in the conversations, and contributing in a positive way. it's a great way to showcase your activities, skill sets and knowledge--in a careful way. This is participation marketing.

Adding to this is the fact that Facebook will soon be integrating profiles into search engine results, meaning your little FB profile could potentially be open to millions (if you choose--FB wisely offers privacy controls if you want to stay under the Google radar screen).

For the critics and doubters--and there are many--this still sounds a little like High School smoke and mirrors. But as you'll see in the next few months, as FB goes mainstream using its powerful platform and emerging financial muscle, this could easily evolve into a central marketing hub--not just for blogging fanatics and marketers, but for anyone who wants to build a community...and their brand.